My wife is a Gymnasium teacher here in Germany, which means she has the training and education to teach high school students — not the little smelly ones who stick raisins up their noses. And Gymnasium teachers don’t just teach 5th through 12th graders; they teach the ones who show real academic promise. Get this: if you aren’t smart enough to go to a Gymnasium, you aren’t allowed to attend a university after graduation. You have to go to a trade school and learn how to repair cars for all the uppity nerds who got better grades than you. Can you imagine? I like to think of a young German man — let’s call him Horst — slaving away beneath some fancy BMW. He’s fixing it the best he can, turning the cranks and tightening the screws, when a shot of oil hits him in the eye like the money shot in a porno. That’s the moment when Fancypants Schillinger, the former high school valedictorian, strolls into the auto shop:
FANCYPANTS: “Well hello there, Horst! I haven’t seen you since you flunked out of our Gymnasium! What have you been up to?”
HORST: “Fixing your car, obviously.”
FANCYPANTS: “Hah hah, good ol’ Horst. Remember how popular you were in school? How you went to all the parties and chased all the girls? I used to be so envious…”
HORST: *Jabbing his hand into the toolbox* “Yup..”
FANCYPANTS: “But then you flunked one too many classes and wound up in a Hauptschule with all the other knuckle draggers. I bet that was a real trip to the zoo, wasn’t it? Hah hah!“
… and that’s how Horst wound up serving life in prison for beating a nerd to death with a monkeywrench.
Anyway, my point is the German educational system — while highly effective — can be a tad elitist. You can imagine why a smart, well-educated Gymnasium teacher might not relish the idea of teaching little kids, especially little American kids. But that’s exactly what my wife did back in 2012, when she spent a year in the United States at a primary school. She did this on a J1 work visa in order to give us the chance to live together as a couple. It was a sacrifice on her part, and I respect the hell out of her for making it. I had to laugh, however, when she was about to leave the States and begin her job as a full-blown Gymnasium teacher in Germany, explaining to me (with no small amount of relief ) how old her future students would be:
THE WIFE: “They are older. I will have 5th through 12th graders. They are not thigh-biters.”*
*3 seconds later: “… I mean ankle-biters.”
Oh God, My Wife Is German. 
That’s an interesting system they have in Germany. There “Gymnasium class” must be a lot more intricate than my high schools where 2/3 of the class sat on the bleachers and gossiped while the 1/3 shuffled aimlessly around the court. The only real sweat that was broken were in the classes tailored around a sport like basketball of football.
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Maybe she never saw an episode from rugrats … ankle-biters is more a term referring to a small dog (like a chihuahua) – not even GERMAN toddlers are known to bite your ankles …
But I think she THOUGHT of the term Wadenbeisser – which is more like calves-biter … and usually is used in connection with smaller soccer players: Wadenbeißer bedeutet: Eine aggressive Person, die sich durch eine besonders kleine Körpergröße auszeichnet – an (Wadenbeisser means – an aggressive person of whom shortness is one of the more outstanding visible features)
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